At least, you must learn to appreciate them. If you don’t, life will be a constant dung sarnie of places you want to be sandwiched between termini of frustration and worry, boredom and fury.

I get on with airports. I like the way they look. I appreciate their ergonomics, their thousands of moving parts, the ant-hill logistics of getting everything in and out. You couldn’t have come up with something more complicated, thousands of people separated from thousands of pieces of luggage, having to be in a certain seat at a precise time to go up to hundreds of destinations. Add thousands of bits of separated luggage and their people coming the other way, all speaking different languages, some travelling for the first time, some for the umpteenth. And just to make it all more exciting, you have to assume that any one of them might be a self-martyring mass murderer and that they will all want to spend 10 pounds on something they didn’t know they needed, and a penny, which they probably suspected they would need.

About Lonely Planet Traveller (UK)

In the January issue…
Find your dream winter amid Yuletide cheer in Vermont, fire festivals in the snowbound Japan Alps and a selection of seasonal experiences out of the ordinary, from the Cairngorms to Lapland; also, head off on a Great Escape to the east of Germany, taking in Berlin, Dresden and classic scenery around both cities; take a food tour of Mexico through five great recipes; and much more